


burned all my notebooks / what good are notebooks

by friendly_ficus



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Espionage, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Multi, Politics, but that's honestly a background factor, classic tension between the church and the religiously-legitimized state, the inherent tension of being in cahoots, well politics-ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:55:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24381655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendly_ficus/pseuds/friendly_ficus
Summary: “You and your idealists,” Donetta murmurs.“You know me, darling. I can’t help it.” Calroy kisses her hand, guides her to the chair that faces the desk.Senator Ciabatta sits on the other side, fingers steepled.“Now,” she says, giving them both a steady look, “let’s talk about this ‘lovers’ farce.”
Relationships: Calroy Cruller & Donetta Cruller & Augustus Ciabatta, Calroy Cruller/Donetta Cruller/Augustus Ciabatta
Comments: 10
Kudos: 39





	burned all my notebooks / what good are notebooks

**Author's Note:**

> this isn’t a comedic story but if you take a single step back at any time and remember that it’s about bread and cake and a donut it becomes. very funny. episode 7 spoilers... maybe? for sure spoilers for ep 6.

Later, ensconced with Donetta somewhere quiet, Calroy will go over the events of the morning in an effort to establish a chain of events. She will insist on it, after she checks him over for injury and convinces their guard to stay  _ outside  _ the door.

The reality was disjointed—the reality is  _ always  _ disjointed, when you get the information from a single source.

Here is what happens:

Calroy doesn’t intend to be in Senator Ciabatta’s courtyard, grimacing in the early morning light, but he finds himself there anyway. It’s one part acting on instinct and one part taking initiative, that brought him to the Senator’s company; when the princesses brought their midnight tale back to their father, letter about the Pontifex and absolutely no information on Candia in hand, it had felt like an hourglass turning over in the back of his mind. Something missing, an opportunity fading fast.

So he’s in the Ceresian courtyard, hours before the rest of the senators will be about, sharing a carafe of wine and a mutual interrogation with Augustus Ciabatta. They’re in the middle of dancing around how long Primogen Alfredi had been present in Ceresia when someone bursts into the courtyard, panting so hard her entire oyster-cracker body heaves.

“What is it?” Ciabatta demands, and the serving girl looks at him with a trace of awed devotion in her eyes.

“Amethar Rocks is named an oathbreaker and a false king,” she gasps out between breaths. “Candia falls to Joren Jawbreaker—to  _ war,  _ Senator.”

There is a long moment in which he gives her a coin and dismisses her, where Calroy rests a hand on the hilt of his sword and recalls Ciabatta’s quickness with his gladius.

“Something is very wrong here,” he starts, feeling the net of conspiracy tightening around him. “Help me or fight me, the choice is yours.”

The other man opens his mouth to respond when they hear the heavy footfalls of soldiers marching, growing steadily louder.

“Conventional wisdom and fair treatment go right out the window when people start talking about war,” Calroy says. “You know they won’t take me alive; not for long, at least.”

“Put your cup aside and look at me like you’re in love,” Ciabatta tells him, escorting conventional wisdom to the window himself and inviting it to jump.

There’s no time to make another plan; Calroy tosses his hat across the courtyard, undoes the ties on his sleeves so they fall loose around his shoulders, gets one glove off before the ringing voice of an Imperial captain fills the courtyard.

Looking back, three factors that define the next ten minutes are very clear. The soldiers are embarrassed; they’d come expecting to interrupt an assassination plot, or something of the like. Perhaps a war meeting, something with obvious treason to win them medals from whoever’s going to be giving out medals now. It’ll be someone, Calroy’s sure of it.

The soldiers are Ceresian; much of the guard in Fructera is, and it has never been more useful than in this moment. Ciabatta knows how to speak to them, knows their hometowns and their slang and their mothers’ looks of disappointment. He is something of a revered figure among his countrymen—enough of one that he exerts a certain amount of social pressure by virtue of his presence alone.

The soldiers, as a whole, absolutely do not want to know that he and the Senator were about to get down. A national hero,  _ their  _ national hero, and the married noble from a now-rebelling state? Inconceivable. There must be some other explanation.

One of these facts must be the one that saves Calroy’s life. Another likely saves Donetta’s. Senator Ciabatta spins some lie about them being his informants on the Rocks family, one of those stories with a lot of meaningful pauses that listeners fill in themselves in a more convincing way than the teller ever could. It’s a lie good enough to get them put under guard in his suite of rooms, rather than the cells of the cathedral or the headsman’s block.

(“Luck, dearest,” his wife will tell him later. “I’m sure his performance was masterful, as was yours, but it was no small measure of luck that saw us through.”)

“Does this happen often, then?” he murmurs in an aside to Ciabatta as they are escorted to his rooms at the palace. “Am I the first affair you’ve claimed in this manner?”

“You’re the most interesting,” the senator allows. “It’s the most cosmopolitan conspiracy, certainly.”

“I aim to please,” Calroy smiles. He doesn’t think about the king, he doesn’t think about the princesses and young Liam, he cannot. He cannot. Absolutely all of his focus is needed to survive the next, oh, he’ll call it an hour. Then when the hour is up, he’ll reevaluate.

He spends that hour in the sitting room connected to Senator Ciabatta’s study while the man speaks to a stream of servants and couriers, allowing him access to a surprising amount of information. Or perhaps it’s not surprising; they are confidants, now, sharing a lie. Perhaps they will be conspirators, if Ciabatta doesn’t turn on him and leave him to his death.

The household is the sting Calroy feels most keenly, before he hears about Lapin. There’s nothing to be done for the servants; no word of the Tartguard has come back from the Cathedral, and if the squires and coachmen know the way the wind is blowing they’ll be disappearing into the city as best they can. A couple of his favorites might try to go and warn Caramelinda—Calroy has little hope for their lives.

The Swirlys are imprisoned, according to a church initiate in Ciabatta’s pay. By Calroy’s estimation, their long-term survival is unlikely. Lapin  _ is  _ dead. Calroy sets grief aside. He sets fear aside. He sets self-recrimination aside. He will need all of his focus to survive, oh, another hour. 

Ciabatta doesn’t blanch when the guards in the hallway announce Donetta, he’s far too composed to do a thing like that. It is a kindness he shows them, that he retreats into the study and closes the door to allow Calroy a moment of privacy with his wife.

Or he is planning another way to kill them. Oh, well.

\---

“My crumb,” her husband declares expansively, throwing open his arms in welcome. 

Donetta doesn’t flinch at the additional guards lining the outer hall, though she’s marking their positions every second. There are no shackles on her wrists; it’s likely that they’ve decided she doesn’t need them, if there are a dozen Imperial spears between her and freedom at any given time. The guard that closes the door behind her is a Ceresian soldier and not an Imperial one—she gives Donetta a nod that is both suspicious and respectful.

Then she is alone with Calroy, who drops his smile but keeps his arms open, folds her into a tight embrace.

“I must apologize—”

“You haven’t betrayed me,” Donetta says, despite the rumors flying through the servants and guards, that her husband has engaged in espionage or a passionate affair or a mixture of the two. She knows him. Twenty years of marriage, twenty-two of knowing Calroy and working within each other’s schemes, she knows him. 

This ploy reeks of quick thinking, of desperation. If it were any other time, any less chaotic, she’s certain it wouldn’t have worked so far. It may yet crumble beneath them.

“You are no traitor,” she tells him. “Not to our marriage nor our nation.”

“Amethar will believe me—” Calroy begins, and his desire to reassure her is sweet but laughable.

She cuts him off, breaks from the embrace but keeps a hold of one of his hands. “Amethar would want us to say whatever we must to survive. Joren Jawbreaker  _ will not  _ feel the same.” 

Calroy is, he’s, she loves him. She loves him, but the Rocks  _ he’d  _ followed through the Ravening War had survived against all odds. Their king, the Unfallen; some part of her husband believes he never will, loathe as he is to admit it. Donetta, who stood in honorable vigil over Princess Sapphira’s corpse for three days, has a much better perspective on the fragility of monarchs.

“Especially not with Ceresia involved,” he looks at her with steady eyes, holds her hand with a steady hand as she keeps talking. “It will not be kind to your reputation either way, you know. It won’t look good back home.”

“We may never see Candia again,” he says, and she sees her own pained realizations reflected on his face. They have had, all told, two hours to come to terms with the fact that the world they helped build has fallen apart, foundations dissolved like spun sugar. “But better a poor reputation than a certain death.”

( _ We have stood on more dangerous battlefields,  _ Donetta had assured the queen before they left on this damned venture.  _ I promise, we’ll all come home and laugh when this business is done. _

It was not a promise she could reliably make, as it turns out, but you tell royalty what it needs to hear.)

“Lapin was brave,” she says, lowering her already low voice. She cannot risk her words, should not give voice to them at all—who knows how thin the two doors in this room are, who knows if there are secret alcoves hidden behind the walls for listening ears—but Calroy and his strange honor deserve them. 

The crown calls them to be weapons, needs them to work in the shadows more often than not. It calls her to miss their tenth anniversary to attend Joren Jawbreaker’s sixteenth handfasting, it calls him to miss their fifteenth to go as an envoy to the Dairy Islands; the point is that it calls them to make sacrifices. It calls them to lie, to befriend foes, to sleep deeply despite the blood on their hands, that they might wake to spill more.

The crown did not call on Lapin to do these things, but he did them anyway. For all that they must hide the wound away, she knows Calroy is pained by grief. He squeezes her hand, once.

If she loved him any less, if she trusted him any less, she might ask how he’s faring, might question the treacherous path they now have to walk. She might point out the ridiculousness of it all. She might note that even if they do everything right, it’s more likely that they meet unmarked graves than any kind of happy ending.

“I suppose we ought to go and see Augustus, then,” she says, raising her voice slightly for the benefit of the guards outside.

“I do hope to have a prosperous friendship with him,” Calroy allows. “Once all this business has passed, of course.”

He offers his arm and escorts her to the door to the study, knocking once before opening it. At a desk so large it’s meant to be imposing, the senator sits paging through half a dozen letters. Donetta takes a moment to observe him. It’s a good setup; he could’ve been listening at the door ten seconds ago, but there’s no indicator of it now. 

“Marquesa,” he greets, rising from his chair. “I wish we were meeting under better circumstances. But we must do what we can now to salvage the situation.”

It's in his face—regret. Whether for the situation or for the lie, and it is a  _ bad  _ lie, one that will have a dozen holes in it, he is uncomfortable. But this is the situation. This is the story. Donetta has done more with less.

But still, when he says  _ better circumstances,  _ she sees a flicker of the truth. He  _ wants  _ better circumstances, then. From what he told the princesses, he wants the world to change.

“You and your  _ idealists,”  _ Donetta murmurs to her husband. 

“You know me, darling. I can’t help it.” Calroy kisses her hand, guides her to the chair that faces the desk.

Senator Ciabatta sits back down on the other side, fingers steepled. 

“Now,” she says, giving them both a steady look. They need someone to be steady now, with Calroy grieving and Ciabatta so close to change he can taste it. “Let’s talk about this ‘lovers’ farce.”

\---

There are several matters to hammer out at the first of many secret discussions, enough that they eventually call for wine and speak late into the evening, establishing earlier meetings and false dead drops. Everything hinges on Ciabatta’s participation, his desire to see the truth and the danger he, too, is in. Word comes that Lady Uvano named him as her father’s successor; even though it was quickly proven to be a lie, the implication of his involvement in the situation remains.

It paints him in a light that his people are unhappy with, which is beneficial. For every other senator who plots against him, there are a dozen servants and guards already on the defensive. It is  _ their  _ hero’s honor that has been called into question. They are quick to defend him against anyone, for any reason; be it the rumor of a power play or a scandal with a Candian noble.

Calroy, as said Candian noble, encounters a mix of attitudes over the next few days. Out and out suspicion is very common, from everyone he meets, but there is an element of protectiveness from some of the Ceresians as well. It’s political; Ciabatta is a powerful man, and they seek to advance their status through his favorite. But even the veneer of protection is useful, the half a dozen times the Church comes knocking and someone lies about his presence. He is very visibly invisible, in that way. Someone always knows where he is, if only to misdirect someone else.

It gives Donetta some cover. For all that she is ostensibly one of Ciabatta’s spies along with Calroy, people are quick to dismiss her from the narrative. No one lies about the Marquesa’s whereabouts, because few think to ask about her. She has not gone about acting scorned, she adds nothing to the drama that continues in the capital.

The night after it all happens, still without news on the rest of the royal party and before they even know what the dynamic is going to be, she and Ciabatta visit Primogen Alfredi’s house.

These things get lost in the shuffle, you see. Someone has to tie up the loose ends.

\---

“Augustus,” Donetta said, at some point in that long first meeting, “are you telling me that the Primogen had secrets on half the houses in Calorum, and you  _ left them  _ in her  _ house?” _

Now she shadows him through the dark streets of Comida, the both of them ducking patrols and avoiding the increased security presence. It’s a quiet night, nothing in the air to give rise to the war. But then for the residents of the capital, the war will happen somewhere far away.

“Marquesa,” he bows slightly, gesturing at the open door after he picks the lock. Perhaps he will put one of his swords through her back.

“Augustus,” she replies with a nod, and walks ahead of him anyway.

They gather it all: books, letters, the odd bit of church doctrine. An alchemical vial that Ciabatta seems unsurprised by, that makes one’s eyes glow. They work quickly but efficiently, covering each others’ oversights. It pains the senator, Donetta thinks. It makes him unhappy. She pushes.

“If you wanted to keep your hands clean, you chose the wrong profession.” She doesn’t ask why he did it, but the implied question sits in the still air between them.

He huffs a laugh. “I didn’t set out to join the Senate, I just wanted to fight. We aren’t all born for this life,  _ Marquesa.” _

“If you think anyone is, you’re fooling yourself. We all have to learn,  _ Augustus,  _ to meet the standards the world provides.”

He doesn’t reply, instead storing another scroll in the bag. 

“You want the world to be more than what it is.” She glances back toward the table where Alfredi had made the water daggers. “I know that. I know what you said to the princesses when you were last here. My husband, cynical as we both may be, believes in that goal. But listen when I tell you: the world will not care.”

“You are not the first to tell me this—”

“If you want Ceresia to change, if you want  _ Calorum  _ to change, change them before you discard the secrets they are built on. Don’t dull your blade before it sees the battle,” she advises.

They are silent all the way back to his suite of rooms, one of which has been subtly altered to house herself and Calroy.

“Thank you for your counsel, Lady Donetta,” he says, bidding her goodnight.

She nods, hand on the doorknob before turning to meet his gaze. “You are not the ally I would’ve expected. Perhaps not the one I would have chosen. But we are here, Senator, and I will help you as long as you help us.”

\---

On the third day of their ruse, Lady Donetta entertains an interrogator—pardon, a  _ religious advisor _ —sent by someone in the faith. She does it in the parlor connected to his study, where the door is cracked open just wide enough for Augustus Ciabatta to hear every word.

She is one of the better liars he’s ever known, a high compliment from the lowborn war-hero who clawed his way into Ceresian politics. She doesn’t sidestep questions, but redirects the flow of the conversation subtly enough that the official doesn’t seem to notice.  _ Of course  _ she is shocked at the behavior of the pretender king.  _ Of course  _ she remains devout.  _ Of course  _ the recent rumors about her husband are falsehoods, flights of fancy.

She puts just the right amount of trembling fury into the last part, the faintest hint of insecurity under the words, and Ciabatta can’t help but admire the performance.

But he forgets himself. He stops, takes a breath, listens to the rest without allowing himself an emotional response. He must not come to admire Donetta Cruller, in just the same way he must not come to admire Calroy Cruller; they live and die based on their usefulness to him. That’s it. It is convenient to have competent people working with him. There is no excuse to indulge in fondness.

There is the work of shaping Ceresia, there is the work of reshaping Calorum, there is the work of anticipating what comes in the next few days. He would’ve made a fine emperor, he knows, but a great deal of complications have suddenly arisen. Ciabatta must attend to them.

So, Lady Donetta taking tea with a Church official in his sitting room. So, Calroy Cruller off somewhere with his guards, ingratiating them with young Commander Grissini, who has received no small amount of acclaim for his work in the cathedral. So himself, in his study, examining the state of the world.

The church has lost two of their miracle-workers within the span of a few days; while it can inflict its presence on his sitting room, its position is not as secure as its members might like it to be. Sir Keradin was revealed as an assassin before the assembled nobles of Calorum—everyone is pretending to forget that or to call it a Candian feint, but if any of them actually  _ believe  _ it, Ciabatta will eat his gladius. 

As opening salvos go, if it had been an intentional salvo, the Candians had done a considerable amount of damage to the prestige of the Bulbian Church. The entire delegation renouncing the faith, publicly denying the Pontifex’s authority and openly fighting had made a statement. Lapin Cadbury  _ alone _ had dealt blows with his revelations, both that he was a heretic and the particular words he had spoken. It had been loud. It had been public. There’s a rumbling coming from the delegation of the Meat Lands, not that the war with Candia is wrong, but that the Church had perhaps too loud a voice in declaring it.

The capital, already a powder keg on a good day, is raging for a spark.

There is a great push to get the visiting nobility to  _ leave  _ and  _ go home.  _ The Pontifex herself has done a prayer or three for safe journeys, urging the representatives to return home and prepare for war against Candia. What she wants, of course, is to get some of the more unpredictable elements out of the city. What she wants, he’s fairly certain, is to ensure that they don’t convene the council to select the next emperor.

He could’ve been emperor. He came to the capital knowing he probably wouldn’t be, but he— If a council convenes—no. He cannot indulge in what-ifs.

On another front, his people tell him Plumbeline Uvano is besieged by the Church. The Bulbian faith wants everything of Comida, it wants everything of Calorum; it wants Lady Plumbeline to go back to Uvano lands with a glad heart, her purpose served. She, in turn, does not seem eager to leave. She will not see any of them, from acolyte to priest, and spends a great deal of time in her father’s rooms.  _ If  _ a council convenes, she will inevitably claim a seat on it and her voice will have a great weight.

This is good. It’s always good, in Ciabatta’s opinion, when your enemy has enemies. Even if you aren’t sure who the enemy is. The Church, clearly. The rest of it... 

He is not fond of the idea of war, but it does provide a path to advancement. What he truly dislikes is that he has been made a pawn in the games of others. In Comida, far from his base of power, he has been relegated to being a piece when he ought to be a player.

It is always good when your enemy has enemies. In no circumstance does it make them your friends.

Lady Donetta taps gently on the open door and he nods at her to enter, settles in to dissect the conversation she’s just had. She is reliable and he knows what she wants, at least. The truth, or something close to it.

\---

Calroy knows that his wife thinks he has a soft spot for idealists, for world-changers, for rising stars. He knows that she compensates for it in a variety of ways, most of which are unavailable to her now. He knows that she has never called it a weakness, but sees it as one all the same.

She isn’t wrong. It might be for different reasons than she thinks—they haven’t discussed his motivations on the matter—but the point remains that he likes having someone with a cause nearby, a touchstone. In the war, Amethar had been young and fierce and grieving, fighting for a future that his sisters would never get to see. Jet Rocks, too, had a driving desire to see the world reshaped. His obedience has never been as unconditional as Sir Theobald’s, but he’d had more than twenty years to learn to work with dreamers, even as Amethar’s had guttered out.

This is how you work with someone like Senator Ciabatta, who believes Ceresia can change, who put himself in danger to protect Calroy with little guarantee of his use: you just help him.

It’s not clear what Ciabatta’s goal here is, not yet. The man himself may not even know. What he  _ clearly  _ understands is that information is powerful, that the truth is powerful. So, Calroy will help him get it.

Perhaps it is a spirit that leads him to the vacant shopfront, with only Ciabatta’s guards in attendance. Calroy would tend towards a combination of investigation and dumb luck, which has gotten him through, oh, the last eight days of his life. Or the last twenty years, depending on your perspective.

What happens: there is a tiny smear of yellow blood on the doorframe, there is his sword in his hand as he advances through the shadows, helpfully ‘forgotten’ by his guards. There is, in a single shaft of sunlight, Sir Morris Brie’s shocked face.

And there is an eyewitness to the massacre in the cathedral, weak from torture, half-dazed and healing: Manta Ray Jack, hero of the Ravening War.

\---

Everything changes.

Everything has already changed, of course. Donetta knows her promise to the queen is long broken, that nine days ago it became an impossibility. But everything changes  _ again. _

They hide Sir Morris and Manta Ray in another corner of the city, communicating through notes and codes not used since coordinating the Candian-Dairy Islands offensive during the war. She and Calroy read Augustus in on them; they’re no longer used, and, well. If Joren Jawbreaker names them traitors, the Crullers will die whether they kept the codes to themselves or shared them.

He listens to them, is the thing. He hears Donetta’s advice and Calroy’s schemes, goes over them in quiet tones during the relentlessly long Comida evenings.

Donetta waits for him to prove himself false, waits for him to reveal them to the Church or Grissini or whoever else matters, but with every day he becomes more embroiled in the plots. What began as a promise to uncover the truth takes on a very different tone, when the lives of Sir Morris and Manta Ray are on the line.

Donetta hates games of chance. She dislikes the arbitrary nature of luck, the randomness of the cards. She rarely gambles.

Her life and Calroy’s are bet on Augustus’ continued good opinion, and she can navigate that. But the Dairy Islanders can only offer him a little. No court would hear Manta Ray Jack’s word against the Pontifex, and none would hear Sir Morris’ testimony about his conditions. They are useful for their secrets but they only have so many—he helps them anyway.

“You admire him,” she murmurs to Calroy one night, curled up against him in the Ceresian-style bed. “Augustus, I mean.”

He laughs, quiet but mirthful. “You  _ confer  _ with him, dearest. I have never known you to do that without some level of admiration.”

The conversation sits between them in the soft darkness for a while. 

They both miss home, is the thing. They miss Castle Candy, they miss the familiar stars over the Great Stone Candy Mountain. They miss friends lost in the war, friends lost  _ since  _ the war, and friends that will be lost in the coming war. There are so many things to miss.

Why miss an opportunity to take some happiness?

“I don’t wish to lie about this,” Calroy offers.

“Then let’s not lie.”

The crown calls on them to manipulate, to make friends of enemies, to laugh with murderers. Even when they’re kind, it’s—even with Primsy, as sweet a kid as she was, there was a purpose to it. There were orders to watch her and befriend her, to act as the mentors she so wanted.

Everything is so much more precarious than it was, operating on insight and initiative. They’ve developed a good working relationship, as predictable as it’s likely to get. To introduce a new element, something as unpredictable and fragile as affection...

Since finding Manta Ray Jack and Sir Morris, since a frantic night where they haggled over movement and security and ultimate goals until the sun rose, something has shifted. 

Every time she calls him Augustus, Donetta sees his hands clench. 

Every time he moves through a sword stance in the courtyard, Calroy feels Ciabatta watching him from the balcony.

“Not tonight,” Donetta sighs at last. “We don’t have to figure it out tonight.”

\---

At some point, every lie has the opportunity to become true.

They talk around and around it for days, the lack of news about the royal party that presumably made it out of the city a perpetual itch between Calroy’s shoulders. What to do with Manta Ray Jack and Sir Morris, where to send them, how much to read them in on, nothing is agreed on for a long time. They focus on recovery, on finding a physician who can be either trusted (of which there are none) or pressured into silence.

Eventually, at last, they smuggle the two men out of the city—confirmation that the two of them have made it to the Dairy Islands comes through a complicated chain of merchants and spies and old war buddies. They don’t see the impact of it in the capital but there are whispers that the council on the Islands has convened, talk about ship maintenance and overdue visits home from the dockhands. Nothing ignites fury like a hometown hero getting the shit beat out of him, Calroy knows, and despite his relatively low station Manta Ray is much loved by his people.

Every move they make is as watched as ever, even as Calroy provides a sympathetic ear for the young man whose troops slaughtered their way through the Tartguard. There is the continued pressure from the Church on  _ every  _ figure of note in the city, either to swear that this is some kind of holy war or to leave entirely. They hear nothing of the Swirlies, of Limon, of any of the household. 

They are watched, dissected, analyzed—but there are moments of privacy, too, in the study and the sitting room that are slowly becoming more and more familiar.

“Augustus,” Donetta says one evening, after she and Calroy have had two more conversations on the matter.

“Marquesa?” he tilts his head to one side, almost teasing her.

“Calroy, in case anyone was wondering,” Calroy offers, raising his glass in a toast.

Donetta raises an eyebrow and Calroy puts aside his wine, looks at Ciabatta.

His wife removes her hat.

The senator sighs, scrubs a hand across his eyes.

“This will be the death of us all,” he predicts, and the Crullers exchange a smile.

**Author's Note:**

> title for this fic comes from ‘Life During Wartime’ by the Talking Heads. yeah.   
> ‘did this fic make sense?’ you may be wondering. i ask you—do you need it to make sense? this is food world. i gave myself complete permission to just lean in to every impulse while writing this story (while writing this the vibe was me as a child emperor, ordering more and more elaborate fancies) and i hope it was fun to read. every time i think i’ve written the most niche thing i’ll ever write i get the urge to up the ante.  
> leave a comment and let me know what you think! this was the product of a lot of very mundane headcanons and a deep love of npcs, and i hope it was fun to read :)


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